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ARTS FOR WHOSE SAKE?

Today Index on Censorship published its report, Beyond Belief – Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order. Taking as its starting point the controversies surrounding Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s 2004 play Behzti – which was forced off stage by violent demonstrations by members of the Sikh community outraged by scenes in the play depicting rape and violence in a gurdwara – and her 2010 follow-up work Behud, the report explores the issue of the policing of controversial art. Among those contributing to the report are Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Jude Kelly, Jatinder Verma, David Edgar, Michael Billington, Jonathan Heawood, Virgine Jortay and Jo Glanville. Here is the keynote essay, ‘Arts for Whose Sake?’, that I wrote for the report.

ONE WAY OF READING THE BEHZTI CONTROVERSY IS AS A MATTER OF miscommunication. When the Birmingham Rep decided to consult the local Sikh community about the play, it imagined that it was simply gauging the views of community elders about a potentially controversial work. As Trina Jones, general manager of the Rep at the time of the controversy, put in a panel discussion about Behzti, ‘We were clear that there were elements of the play that may upset folk… The purpose of that dialogue was really to share our concerns, not really to enter into consultations about the play itself; our intention was never to offer the play up for any development or change.’ Sikh leaders, on the other hand, believed that they were being consulted about the play itself, and that their views would be taken into account in determining its content and tone. Out of that difference of expectations, one could argue, emerged the Behzti controversy.

The problem, however, is clearly deeper than simply one of crossed wires. The differences of expectations were themselves an expression of the way that the role of the theatre has changed in recent years, as has its relationship to local communities. To understand the Behzti affair, we need to understand that change and in particular how two recent trends have combined to transform the very character of censorship. The first is a shift in the social meaning of theatre – and of the arts more generally – and in the perception of the role of the audience. The second is a change in our understanding of diversity and of how it should be managed. The consequence has been the remaking of censorship which, as Svetlana Mintcheva and Robert Atkins observe in the Introduction to their book Censoring Culture, has become ‘invisible’, operating increasingly as a moral imperative, or as the inevitable result of the impartial logic of the market, rather than as a legal imposition.

Over the past twenty years there has been a growing tendency to view the arts in terms of its social impact. There is nothing new, of course, in the idea that the arts should have a social function. What has changed, however, has been the development of an increasingly instrumental view of culture and the enthroning of the audience as the gauge of artistic value. These ideas have become embodied in two seemingly very different political philosophies: the Thatcherite free market ideology of the 1980s and the idea of social inclusion promoted by New Labour at the end of the following decade.

In the 1980s, the Conservative administration rowed back on state subsidies and opened up the arts to the market. This process of marketisation undermined ‘elite’ forms of art and encouraged more populist programming. It also led to a new emphasis on the audience as the arbiter of artistic (and social) worth. ‘We are coming to value the consumer’s judgment as highly as that of the official or the expert’, wrote the Arts Council chairman William Rees-Mogg in his 1988 annual report. ‘The voice of the public must… be given due weight.’ ‘The way in which the public discriminates’, he added, ‘is through its willingness to pay for its pleasures.’ The meaning of ‘the public’ had subtly changed here, referring not so much to the body politic of democracy as to the aggregated weight of individual consumers.

When New Labour came to power in 1997 these trends became intensified. At the heart of the new administration’s cultural policy was a belief that the arts had a crucial role in promoting economic growth, urban regeneration and, in particular, ‘social inclusion’. Cultural organizations had to think about how their work could support government targets for health, social inclusion, crime, education and community cohesion. In the words of one DCMS study, Culture in Demand, the wider social benefits of cultural involvement included ‘the reduction of social exclusion, community development, improvements in individual self-esteem, educational attainment or health status.’ The Arts Council insisted that only works that sought ‘to provide positive benefits for communities, such as bringing different groups of people together, reaching people who experience particular disadvantage or deprivation’ would receive funding.

‘Consultation’ became a centerpiece of arts policy. ‘Cultural planning’ as Graeme Evans and Jo Foord explained, ‘is a process of inclusive community consultation and decision-making that helps local government identity cultural resources and think strategically about how these resources can help a community to achieve its civic goals.’ It needed to be ‘a consultative and participatory process involving all interested groups within the local and artistic community.’ It was not enough to expect the audience to come to the theatre or gallery or museum. The cultural institutions themselves had to develop its audience by meeting the needs of diverse groups. All ‘ages, religions, cultures, sexualities, disabilities and socio-economic backgrounds… should be given the chance… to find their voice and to contribute to the culture, diversity and creativity of this country’, as the Brian McMaster’s DCMS review Supporting Excellence in the Arts put it.

And this leads us to the second important change over the past twenty years: the remaking of our understanding of diversity and of how it should be managed. In 2000, the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, set up by the Runnymede Trust under the chairmanship of political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh, published its report. Britain, the Parekh report concluded, was ‘both a community of citizens and a community of communities, both a liberal and a multicultural society’. Since citizens had ‘differing needs’, equal treatment required ‘full account to be taken of their differences’. Equality, the report insisted ‘must be defined in a culturally sensitive way and applied in a discriminating but not discriminatory manner.’

The two arguments at the heart of the Parekh report – that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ and that equality must be defined ‘in a culturally sensitive way’ – have come to be seen as defining the essence of multiculturalism. These ideas first emerged in the 1980s as both local and national authorities attempted to respond to the anger of minority communities to the entrenched racism that they faced, an anger that exploded into the inner city riots of the late seventies and early eighties.

The riots led to the recognition that minority communities had to be given a stake in the system, a recognition out of which developed the policies of multiculturalism. The Greater London Council, in particular, pioneered a strategy of organizing consultation with minority communities, drawing up equal opportunities policies, establishing race relations units and providing funding for minority organizations. At the heart of the strategy was a redefinition of racism. Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but the denial of the right to be different. Different peoples should have the right to express their specific identities, explore their own histories, formulate their own values, pursue their own lifestyles. In this process, the very meaning of equality was transformed: from possessing the same rights as everyone else to possessing different rights, appropriate to different communities.

At the same time as an instrumental view of culture encouraged arts institutions to view their work primarily through the lens of social inclusion, and the commodification of culture placed a premium upon audience development, the emergence of multicultural policies helped define both social inclusion and audience development in terms of the empowerment of local communities. And key to empowering the community was ensuring that its culture and beliefs were not disparaged or ridiculed.

For diverse societies to function and to be fair, so the argument ran, pubic discourse had to be policed both to minimise friction between antagonistic cultures and beliefs and to protect the dignity of the individuals embedded in those cultures. ‘If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict’, as the sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, ‘they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism.’

It was in the wake of the campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses that this argument began to influence mainstream cultural policy. The philosopher Shabbir Akhtar became the spokesman for the Bradford Council of Mosques at the height of the Rushdie affair. ‘Self-censorship’, he insisted, ‘is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s – not least every Muslim’s – business.’ In other words, in a plural society each community should have the right to decide what can be written or said about any matter that it regards as being of crucial cultural or religious importance.

Rushdie’s critics lost the battle – they failed to prevent the publication of The Satanic Verses. But they won the war. Policy makers and arts administrators came broadly to accept the argument that it was morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures, and that every community possessed the right to be consulted over how it may be depicted. It was an argument that brought together a moral claim, a social aspiration and a commercial imperative. Multiculturalism gave communities the moral right not be traduced. Social inclusion required arts institutions to give communities a voice and to allow them to depict themselves. And the market established the audience as a key arbiter of both the artistic value and the moral worth of a work. All three of these strands were woven into the Bezhti controversy.

But how do we define a community? That question has been all too rarely asked in the debate about cultural diversity and community empowerment. In fact, much cultural policy as it has developed over the past two decades has come to embody a highly peculiar view of both diversity and community. There has been an unstated assumption that while Britain is a diverse society, that diversity ends at edges of minority communities. The claim that The Satanic Verses is offensive to Muslims, or Bezhti to Sikhs, or indeed that Jerry Springer: The Opera is offensive to Christians, suggests that there is a Muslim community, or a Sikh community or a Christian community all of whose members are offended by the work in question and whose ostensible leaders are the most suitable judges of what is and is not suitable for that community. All are viewed as uniform, conflict-free and defined primarily by ethnicity, culture and faith. As a Birmingham Council report acknowledged about the council’s own multicultural policies, ‘The perceived notion of homogeneity of minority ethnic communities has informed a great deal of race equality work to date. The effect of this, amongst others, has been to place an over-reliance on individuals who are seen to represent the needs of views of the whole community and resulted in simplistic approaches toward tackling community needs.’ The city’s policies, in other words, did not simply respond to the needs of communities, but also to a large degree created those communities by imposing identities on people and by ignoring internal conflicts and differences. They empowered not individuals within minority communities, but so-called ‘community leaders’ who owed their position and influence largely to the relationship they possessed with the state.

Shabbir Akhtar no more spoke for Muslims than Salman Rushdie did. Both represented different strands of opinion. So did Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and the outraged protestors outside the Birmigham Rep. In both cases, the conflict was not between a community and the wider society, but was one within that community itself. In fact, in almost every case, what is often called offence to a community is actually a dialogue or debate within that community. That is why so many of the flashpoints over offensiveness have been over works produced by minority artists – not just Salman Rushdie and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti but also Hanif Kuresihi, Monica Ali, Sooreh Hera, Taslima Nasrin and countless others.

Thanks, however, to the perverse notion of diversity that has become entrenched, Shabbir Akhtar has come to be seen as an authentic Muslim, and the anti-Bezhti protestors as proper Sikhs, while Salman Rushdie and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti are regarded as too Westernized, secular or progressive to be truly of their community. To be a proper Muslim, in other words, is to be offended by The Satanic Verses, to be a proper Sikh is to be offended by Bezhti. The argument that offensive talk should be restrained is, then, both rooted in a stereotype of what it is to be an authentic Muslim or a Sikh and helps reinforce that stereotype. And it ensures that only one side of the conversation gets heard.

The Bezhti affair reveals the need to rethink ideas of community and diversity. Much of political and cultural policy contains within it unstated assumptions that have had devastating consequences for writers and performers, for arts institutions and for their audience. It also reveals the need to rethink the concepts of social inclusion and audience development. The combination of an instrumental view of culture, embodied in recent ideas of the arts as a vehicle for social inclusion, and a multicultural view of diversity has led, ironically, to the exclusion of many voices, and to the establishment of a culture of invisible censorship, a culture in which such censorship has come to be expressed as a moral imperative.

Any work of art will offend some people and inspire others. That is the nature of conversation in a plural society. It is not the job of arts administrators, or of policy makers, to decide who can speak or what they can say. It is their job, rather, to encourage, as best they can within an artistic setting, that conversation to flourish. That is the real social function of art.

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2 comments

Anders Solli Sal

Brilliant! It is pretty clear that these shifts in the zeitgeist or modes of thinking about rights and the representations of opinions in the heir of multiculturalism poses a definite challenge that has to be addressed. In Norway, it is almost impossible to defend an individual’s right to criticize issues when they are “cultural sensitive”, without being accused of being discriminating, if not racist. The concern of the group has trumped the awareness of the individual. Whether or not the individual delivering the criticism is within that particular group.
After reading your book, From Fatwa to Jihad, I read Flemming Rose’s just released book called The Tyranny of Silence, and it is a monumentally important book. It treats the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, giving his story about it. With its almost five hundred pages, it gives some really thought promoting and highly relevant points. With his living in Soviet for some decades, in close contact with the human rights groups there, as a background, he makes some alarming points, similar to yours, about e.g., how the concept of tolerance has changed through recent history. From meaning to tolerate other people’s opinions diverging and even provoking your own, to the correctness of being silent with what might be received as offensive. He then shows by drawing the implications of this, and their juridical forms in the UN, how extremely dangerous this development is. While as for now it means in the Western countries some censoring without maybe dire consequences – though this might change – these paragraphs, blasphemy- and offence laws, are in many of today’s Muslim countries being used to silence all opposition, with resulting death penalties, because it is all too simple for those in power to execute or do this – since it is, not in the utterer, but in the recipient or listener, to define what is to be qualified as offensive. He cites five concrete cases where this has happened, all in the last couple of years. That is alarming..

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. After ending it I immediately thought that this has to be the one most important book I’ve ever read. It also builds some deal on your above mentioned book, which he highly praises and mention several times! I hope it won’t take long till it gets translated to English.
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to your next book! When is the expected release date?